League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on April 11, 2009

Since about 2002, I’ve lived what seems like an ever-increasing part of my life online. Once I got over the initial thrill back then of “surfing the web” (i.e., coasting randomly form web site to web site), I settled into what has been my most abiding interest and passion: social web sites. As I’ve been thinking about it, there’s been a sort of evolutionary progression in my social web activities.

Single-celled Protozoa Stage: Forums

I was introduced to the social web through a forum called The Rumor Forum. It began as a place for fans of the Christian folk rock group Caedmons Call to discuss rumors about the band. Before long, it morphed into a vibrant community of hundreds of “regulars” who discussed just about anything, only a small portion of the discussion about the band. The forum mode is efficient, easy to understand and use, and semi-closed (full participants must be members). Most forums are divided up into “rooms” that enable users to find topics of interest to discuss. Thus they tend to be somewhat linear and hierarchical. One starts by browsing general categories, then drills down to specific topic rooms, then a list of topics within the room.

Reptilian Stage: Facebook

Then came Facebook. Moving from the forum mode to Facebook was a little like going away to college. Of course that analogy breaks down the moment you stop to think who your first “friends” were on Facebook: family members and people you already knew–exactly the people you were getting away from when you went to college. But let me try to rescue the metaphor. Like college, Facebook lets you begin to expand horizons, meet new people, try out new things, but still in a relatively safe and controlled environment. Plus every time they change the interface, it’s like picking up the catalog for next year and finding that your college has discontinued your major.

Primate Stage: Twitter

I knew about Twitter for almost a year before I started using it. Twitter’s genius is its simplicity: 140 characters, anyone in the world can follow your stream, no filters or channels or rooms. I didn’t get it at first; I already had status updates on FB; why would I want another channel with (only) the same thing? But later I realized the power of this wide-open, deceptively simple medium.

Because it’s so simple and wide open, messages can “go viral” rather quickly. I know routinely hear about any breaking news story first on Twitter (@BreakingNews is best for this), long before it’s up on CNN. Downside: as you increase the number of “tweeps” you follow, the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up. The Twitter stream turns into rapids and you feel like you’re drowning. Third party apps like Tweetdeck help some (Tweetdeck allows you to sort your friends into groups), but it easily gets overwhelming.

Behold Homo Sapien: FriendFeed

With the release of a beta update of FriendFeed earlier this week, I believe I’ve found the new hub of my social web. FriendFeed probably has the highest entry learning curve of any of the socweb sites, but also the richest payoff. Like most of the other socweb contenders, FriendFeed allows users to post status messages, links, photos, videos etc.

Where the fun begins, though, is with the commenting facility. This feature makes FriendFeed the true microblogging application, as any status, link share, photo, etc. can have a whole discussion thread attached to it. FriendFeed beta added live streaming. Once you’ve subscribed to a number of active users, you can watch the posts roll by, clicking “comment” or “like” on the one’s that interest you.

Another powerful feature of FriendFeed is Filters. Filters are basically saved live searches. You can add any of your subscribers or groups to a filter. For example, you could create a filter called “Photography” and add users and groups who primarily talk about photography or post photos. Filters allow you to pivot table your home stream and slice into it any way you want. You can even filter for posts that have a minimum number of comments and/or “likes” to get to what others have judged to be most interesting.

What’s your social web story? If you’ve written about your social web experiences on your own blog, link it here in the comments. What social web tools have been most helpful to you? Which ones have you abandoned, or never quite “got”?

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Category: It`s All About Me
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